Young Social Innovators Summit

Young Social Innovators Summit

A Report by Lana McCaffrey & Brooke Fagan Merrigan (1 Sepia)

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Our Trip to the Young Social Innovators

On Wednesday the 7th of February, we went to DCU Alpha to participate in the Young Social Innovators Summit, or YSI for short, with Ms. Doyle. There were five schools participating in the YSI Summit and they all brought five students to represent their school. The students who represented St. Marys were Mia Grange, Megan O’Sullivan, Ruby Gill, and ourselves, Brooke Fagan and Lana McCaffrey.

Social Innovation is the practice of using creative thinking to come up with solutions to improve the well-being of people in society. the Young Social Innovators Programs encourage young people to have a say in social issues in their community. YSI was set up to give young people an opportunity to make a change in their community.

In DCU Alpha, we did an A-Z of social issues to get us started. We discovered that there was at least one issue, if not more, for each letter. We had to pick an issue in our community that we would like to change and think through how we would go about making a change. We decided on ‘Harmful Stereotyping’. This exercise was beneficial because we will now have to do a similar exercise with all of the members of our SPHE class. As a class, we will have to decide on a social issue that needs attention within our community which we will then base our project on. We really enjoyed our trip to the summit and are excited to begin our YSI journey.